A few days ago we silently released our first contribution to System One Labs, the place where we test and play with new ideas that might become features of System One. Retrievr lets you find Flickr images by drawing rough sketches, and this must have hit the mark according to the feedback so far:

John Battelle thinks "Oooo, i like this...", Tara Calishain got it with "You won't be able to find electronics schema screenshots with this, but it's an awesome way to browse", Matt Haughey is over-enthusiastic "...retrievr is so good, I'd venture to say it's getting close to Turing Test territory" and Jason Kottke says "Retrievr is a simple, amazing use of the Flickr API". Special gratitude for the "All my wasted years of practicing drawing Goatse Man on MS Paint has just paid off." comment on the metafilter post, this also made our day. Thanks for all the appreciation, we'll try to continue what we started here!

Deepest thanks to Chris Langreiter for the idea to merge a 1995 paper with 2005 flickr and of course then executing it brilliantly.